


Dies illa

by goosecathedral



Category: J’ai vu le loup le renard chanter (Traditional Song)
Genre: Bandits & Outlaws, Cathars, F/F, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Implied/Referenced Death in Childbirth, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Redemption, Starvation, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 09:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11033085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goosecathedral/pseuds/goosecathedral
Summary: An outlaw, a renegade Inquisitor, and a witch walk into a greenwood...





	Dies illa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FannyT](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FannyT/gifts).



They live in the greenwood, all three, a queer commonweal, to be sure. And when the fires are lit on St John’s Eve I will join them, we shall be four, and complete.

Wulf comes first. He’s tall, grizzled and haggard, a man of the fens. They need those long legs to jump from tussock to tussock. He once commanded the retinue of a great earl. Wulf loved his lord, and also his lord’s youngest sister, to whom he was informally betrothed. But then her brother gave her in marriage to weave a peace. She went to her wedding with Wulf’s child in her belly. Despite her new husband’s tenderness towards her (for he was not a cruel man, and moreover anxious to preserve the alliance he had made) she went listless and silent about her duties, and when at leisure sat wanly at the hall door, staring towards her brother’s lands. Her husband was pleased when after six weeks of marriage she still had not bled, but angry when, far too soon, her waist swelled and she quickened. He banished her to an outbuilding, with one old bondswoman to serve her, and the feud began again. 

Wulf took to the roads, a masterless man, _nithing_. He banded with one or two others of the kind, and together they plotted to carry the young woman away. One night they broke into the shed where she was lodged, killing the guards set upon its doors. The old thrall confronted them, fearless, and said they were the greatest fools alive: the lady was, by her calculation, only a few days from her time. It was bad enough that she should give birth in this mean hovel, but how did they, houseless men on the run, hope to see her through her confinement and provide for her and the child after? They told her if she would not hold her peace they would kill her as they had the guards, at which the old woman opened her arms with a shrug and said _do it_. Not one of them could. That wakened the young lady, and she said she would go with Wulf and his band, they could tie up the servant and gag her, to show that she had not colluded with them. The bondswoman said, with reason, that on the contrary, nothing would reek stronger of conspiracy, she must go too, to be my lady’s midwife. And so they fled away. When the young woman’s labour came on her they sheltered in an ancient barrow that resembled a massive fox's earth. And there she died, delivered of a stillborn daughter. The old woman said to Wulf, ‘If you would honour her, don’t make of her a lesson for yourself. Remember how she loved to drink, to gossip, to mimic her foolish elders, to dance.’ And she went off over the uplands alone, being weary of life. 

Wulf did not at first grasp her meaning: he made a cult of guilt and penance out of his mourning, broke with his outlaw fellows and wandered until he came to our forest, where he met Renaud. And then, he says, he began to understand the truth of what the old bondswoman had said. 

Renaud and Wulf get drunk under my tree. They talk and talk, and that is how I know their stories. Wulf grows sentimental, he takes Renaud’s sharp jaw in both his hands and kisses him. Renaud says, 'My dear fellow, are you sure?' 

And Wulf: 'Never more of anything in my life.' 

I don’t look any more then, and stop my ears, because what passes then is between them only, and not for me to spy upon. 

Renaud is a heretic. He’s also a priest, which makes things a bit complicated, but not as much as you might think. He goes about the wood singing Mass in his high wild voice, except when you listen carefully the words are not those of the holy office but babble and chatter, sometimes just nonsense, and sometimes indecent nonsense. When there is a thunderstorm he tears off all his clothes and lies naked on the ground, chanting a Kyrie which is not a Kyrie. He is of less than the middle height, very sleek and fair of face. 

The son of a tailor, Renaud attended a school founded by the preaching friars, and discovering a vocation as a young man, joined the Order himself. His learning was great, but his holy zeal still greater, and he was assigned by his superior-general as a clerk to the Inquisition. At first his enthusiasm for extirpating heresy carried him along, and he connived at much that was wrongful and cruel, but after a while he could no longer wink at the inquisitorial courts’ abuses of natural justice. He saw terrible things: intimidation, starvation and immural, empty accusations, false promises and the use of _agents provocateurs_ , lewd humiliations and excruciating torture, even the digging up of a dead man to try him, so that his property might be seized from his heirs. He begged to be released from the work, but was not permitted to return to his old rounds of preaching and service. The dignity and courage of many of the alleged heretics who came before the courts impressed him deeply; likewise he pitied those who were bullied and broken into recantation and shame. He lost what respect he had for the Church and its hierarchy, despaired and contemplated taking his own life. He still thought that a sin, though the heretic view of it as a mere release of the divine spark from a fleshly prison was gaining in him. And then he fell in love. 

The man was beautiful; not in outward appearance, for inhumane treatment had taken its toll. He was gaunt and scarred; no hair grew on one side of his head, his belly was swollen from weeks on a diet of bread and water; he was stinking, filthy and dressed only in a louse-ridden penitent’s robe. But his mind was entire, his voice low and reasonable, his defiance indomitable. Renaud knew at once that a day lived in his company would be of more value in the sight of God than three score years lived in orthodox obedience, even to a Church that had not sunk so far in depravity as to countenance the Inquisition. He packed his bags, hired a horse and forged a document requesting the man’s removal to another prison. 

'The trouble with most shatter-pated schemes,' Renaud remarks sagely, raising his bowl of ale, 'is that they’re not shatter-pated _enough_. They anticipate some difficulties, though not so many as to have a chance of success, and thereby forfeit the protection Our Lady extends to holy fools.' Wulf nods with the profound accord of inebriation, and Renaud continues with his story. 

When they were some miles distant from the bastide which the Inquisition had made its base, Renaud revealed to his heretic beloved that he was not transporting him to another site of incarceration, but freeing him. 

‘No,’ the man said, ‘for I was never in gaol, nor am I out of it, for that matter. You have struck the first and feeble blow, with a hammer made of straw, against your own adamant fetters.’ 

Renaud pondered this, and thought he understood. He asked the man if there was any place of shelter to which he could deliver him, and he nodded, but said they must go on foot. 

‘Let the horse loose,’ he said, ‘it will find its way.’ Renaud took as much of his luggage as he thought he could carry, at which the man smiled, but did not protest. 

It was craggy country that the man led them into, and he was weak, Renaud encumbered. Renaud was soon tired, but his companion, emaciated and stumbling, was nonetheless indefatigable. They did not seem to be going to any place of human habitation, but into a wilderness. Renaud drank from the flask of water he had brought, but the other man refused it whenever it was offered him. At fall of dark they reached a cave, no more than a fissure in the rock. A beck ran nearby. It was a good enough place to make camp, so that they did, lighting a fire in the mouth of the cave. Renaud brought food from his satchel, but the man again said no. Renaud grew alarmed then, and said, ‘This is it, isn't it? The shelter you are bound for isn't on earth.’ 

‘Yes,’ said the other. ‘There may be an unpleasant time to come. The flesh of man is weak, but tenacious, as evil things tend to be. The rulers of the darkness of this world are subtle, and will do anything to cozen a soul out of its rightful home. They will use your compassion against you. But you must not confine me. Even if it means holding me down.’ 

Renaud smiled wanly. ‘I don’t know if I can. You see, I love you.’ 

The man took Renaud in his arms, kissed and comforted him as if he were a child scared of the dark. Exhausted, Renaud fell asleep. He woke at dawn, lying across a cold corpse. He wept bitterly, thinking he had failed a test, and then, to his greater shame, that he had been spared one. Then he saw that his sleeping body had held the other’s in its place, and had not confined him. He got up, scratched a shallow depression in the hard earth with a stone and his bare hands, more like a hare’s form than a grave, and laid the man’s body in it, piling over him any debris he could find. 

Renaud then took to the motley life of a goliard: drinking, playing pranks, chasing rough apprentice boys, and composing satires. And that brought him to our greenwood. 

Of the third of them I know least, because she does not engage so much in the masculine vices of tale-telling and gossip. She has seventy-seven names that I have so far counted, and has never gone by the same one two days running. Her skin is brown, her short soft hair sable, her eyes sharp like obsidian glass. She moves with a lolloping stride and remarkable efficiency. I don't know if I want to make love to her or become her: no, I do, I want both, I want the body that she sometimes vacates. She is a brewster, both of foaming ale, that the two men drink, and of more robust liquors for herself, that may depart into her ecstasy. Then she mounts into the air on a wisp of straw, and shoots thunderstones, not with a bow, but spanging them off her thumbnails. 'Not for harm, only for sport,' she says, and adds, a trifle darkly, 'so far.' 

When she was thirteen years of age a battle was fought on the fields nearby her village. Her family and the other villagers fled the assaults and pillage of the victorious army, who had sustained few casualties, but she stood in the midst of the field, as the defeated buried their many dead and the ravens descended. Her first menstrual blood fell on that same reddened field, and to that she attributes her powers. 

There is no such being as the Devil, she avers: men conjured him out of their delusion that there are some evils of which they are incapable. But the Queen of Faerie exists certainly, who should doubt it? She has been to her house within the hill, danced, sung songs and feasted with her. She goes riding with her, travelling the three Queen’s Roads: the strait and right, the broad lillie leven, and the fernie brae, and to her they are all delightful. 

‘And having eaten her food, were you indentured to the lady of Elfland for seven years?’ asks Renaud. 

She laughs. ‘The faeries know the difference between a man on the make and a girl who just wants to have fun, pal.’ 

At sixteen she was betrothed to a neighbour of her father’s: he was middle-aged, ugly and lumpen, but young, limber, handsome men held no more attraction for her than he, so she agreed with an indifferent shrug. The wedding was not to take place until she was eighteen anyway: an age. The old git would probably be dead before then. When she walked the road that passed by the ancient red pillar, carved with intricate and lovely vines on its sides, and tedious scenes of battle and submission on the front and back, she often met the Reiver, who told her what things would happen: that the long-waited male heir of a certain laird would perish in his sixth month of life, that a tempest would bury the fertile land of the mains in sand and its harvest go ungathered, that the dyer’s vats were contaminated and would stain everything dipped in them as black as her hair. The Reiver was not the Devil, she knew that much. For don't people who believe in the Devil call him the Lord of Lies? The Reiver always told the truth. 

But when she warned the laird and the farmers and the dyer, they first scoffed at her peasant credulity, and when the events came to pass, blamed her for them, sending constables for her arrest. She escaped them by lying down upon the form of a hare, and leapt up from it a leveret, which shape she retained, with mickle grief and care, for seven years. 

‘The life of a hare is very hard. Everyone hunts you, and calls you all the names under the sun,’ she says. But at length she came to the greenwood, and was herself again. 

She suffers from loneliness, she says. Renaud and Wulf have one another, but an occasional dalliance with the Queen under the Hill, though blissful, can’t assuage it. Wulf slings his arm around her shoulder and says he’ll fill her vacancies, any time; she punches his shoulder and Renaud barks a protest. 

‘Look, you never know,’ says Wulf sententiously. ‘You never know what’s coming, or who, and that’s a fact.’ He lifts his bowl to his lips. Renaud throws back his head and launches into one of his parodies, King David's bollocks and what the Sibyl did with them. 

They live in the greenwood, all three. I have studied them for nine years. And when the fires are lit on St John’s Eve I will join them, we shall be four, and complete.


End file.
